1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an optical disc drive which records and reproduces information for an optical disc like a CD-R media or a CD-RW media.
2. Description of the Related Art
The recording format of a CD-R or CD-RW optical disc is prescribed in the Orange Book, an industry standard. The Orange Book rules dictate that data sectors which are not consecutively written require lengthy lead-in and lead-out sectors such as Link, Run-In, and Run-Out sectors. These sectors are necessary to enable optical disc drives to synchronize to the data on the optical media. This is because the laser beam must be repositioned each time a new writing session is started, and known optical disc drive positional controls are not sufficiently accurate to position a laser beam at the exact end point of previously written data.
Therefore, conventional optical disc drives need to write data on an entire track, known as Track-at-Once, or an entire disc, known as Disc-at-Once, continuously in order to avoid adding lead-in and lead-out sectors. In other words, known optical disc drives must write the entire disc or track in a single writing session.
Conventional optical disc drives employ Cross-Interleaved Reed-Solomon Code (CIRC) encoding which is performed by a CD encoder chip. The CD encoder chip automatically encodes the data in a buffer which temporarily stores data from a host while waiting for the data to be encoded and written to an optical media. Another reason that conventional optical disc drives must write data in a single session is that the CD encoder chip will continue to generate dummy data even if the buffer containing data from the host becomes empty. Continuity of data, or data succession, is lost by inserting and writing dummy data in a head where data from a preceding sector was recorded.
Because conventional disc drives need to write an entire track or disc in a single session, a problem is encountered if the flow of data from the host computer to the optical disc drive buffer is interrupted. Since CD-R and CD-RW optical discs are write-once media, a write failure results in the loss of expensive media.
The problem of maintaining data from the host in the optical disc drive buffer is severe when the writing speed of the optical disc drive is high. Because the data size of a track or disc is large compared to the optical disc buffer size, if the data transfer rate between the host computer and the optical drive is even slightly slower than the speed at which data is written to the optical disc, or data transfer between the host and the optical disc drive is interrupted for even a short period, the buffer may go empty. This problem is known as Buffer Run.
Because hosts transmit data at varying rates, some optical disc drives include a test mode that performs a dummy write operation, during which no data is actually written to the optical disc, to ensure that the transmission rate of the host is adequate to prevent buffer run. One problem with this method is that it takes twice as long to write the data to the disc. Also, because hosts sometimes encounter non-repeatable problems, the aforementioned method is not perfectly safe and the risk of losing expensive media due to buffer run errors is not completely eliminated.
Therefore, an optical disc drive that can write data consecutively and normally to an optical media in multiple sessions without the loss of data succession is needed.
Even if logical data succession is ensured as described above, data cannot be normally reproduced without physical correspondence of the succeeding portions of data written in multiple sessions.
Usually, a frame gap of up to +/-2 bits may be present without preventing a conventional optical disc drive from properly reproducing data from an optical disc. However, if a conventional optical disc drive attempts to write multiple sessions of data by selecting a writing start point based on a rotating control by a wobble synchronic signal, a frame gap of scores of bits may result. Therefore, synchronization may be off in that portion and several frames of data may be lost.
Therefore, what is needed is an optical disc drive that is able to correctly detect an end portion of data written in a preceding write session so that an accurate write start point is provided for a succeeding write session.
Further, it is desirable that such an optical disc drive should be able to detect the end portion of data written in a preceding write session at low cost.